On the Verge excerpt—part 3
Verging the Church: Key Themes You Gotta Move It, Move It
The idea of pivotal design is where something that is invented or designed becomes the base design in all subsequent technologies. For instance, the airfoil designed by the Wright brothers is still the base design in all aircraft. The transistor is another example. Or even closer to the idea of movements, the Twelve-Step program; many different interpretations and applications, but the principles remain the same. All further developments build off the base one. We believe that Verge churches—or what we hope will become apostolic movements—might well provide us with one of the pivotal designs for the church in the twenty-first century and beyond.
But in order to comprehend and apply the “new technology” of apostolic movements, we are going to have to do a lot of reframing our thinking and practice. Throughout the book, the reader will find we are moving from more distinctly conceptual material to that which is more concrete and practical. There is simply no way around having to do the conceptual spadework; if we wish to birth apostolic movements in our day, we cannot avoid the intellectual rigor of rethinking the paradigm, recalibrating the system, changing the metaphor and reframing the story of church. But you will find that all the way through there are practical handles, tips, and checklists to facilitate application of what is being said.
We insist that a genuinely apostolic paradigm of the church is by nature inclusive of all forms in service of its mission, whereas the more institutional paradigm is by nature exclusive, demanding high conformity. So we fully recognize, with the writers of The Starfish and the Spider, that all organizations are really hybrids of both centralized and decentralized forms of organization. And while it’s highly unlikely many of the prevailing forms of church in the West can become pure people-movements, we believe that the future viability and growth of the church requires that we have to move more and more toward embracing the forms we call apostolic movements.
We say this because (as we have seen) what has gotten us here will not get us there, but also because it’s clear from church history that movements are our best and most effective expressions of ecclesia. Not only is it our most primal story—the New Testament church was clearly an apostolic movement—but also throughout history it appears we’re at our very best when we have little or nothing of what we think constitutes the church institution. Looking at the early church, the Celtic movement, the Moravian movement, contemporary China, India, and so on, we are at our transformative best as decentralized movements, and we grow faster that way than we ever can with all the institutional accoutrements of church.
The church Jesus designed is a movement and not a religious institution. If this isn’t the case, then there’s no way to understand why Jesus reserves his harshest criticisms not for the so-called sinners but rather for the religious people of his day. It also explains why he chose and empowered ordinary people and not the religious elite to take the gospel to the world. This isn’t to say God doesn’t like order or that there’s no structure to movements; it is to say the original church structure is very unlike the kind of structures that emerged with the Christendom form of church.
We aren’t saying God hasn’t or doesn’t use all expressions of church—clearly he does. We are not even saying that a certain level of institution is not actually necessary to maintain longevity; it is. What we are saying is that we can all do it a whole lot better, and with more theological integrity, by activating an apostolic imagination and by developing movemental forms of the church.
Discarding Either/Or, Embracing Both/And
We have shared this vision of Future Travelers and this book with our grassroots missional friends, and a common response has been, “It can’t be done.” We also have spent time with leaders of large established churches who shake their heads in pessimism. The truth is that both groups, being purists, are captive to the limits of their own acquired (somewhat prejudicial) thinking and are blinded to the possibilities of seeing the church become more. The problem is that for the vast majority of churches and Christians, this oppositional thinking has blocked our capacities to discern a way forward. It also implies that the only way forward for the established church is to close up shop and start again from the ground up. It is a counsel of despair for the established church and signals increasing marginalization from the mainstream for the missional movement as it now exists.
Part of the problem with this is because, to use business consultant Jim Collins’ terms, they fail to embrace the genius of the and. Both groups are locked into the trap of either/or thinking. Seen from the perspective of either/or, these forms of church are irreconcilable, but reconceived from the perspective of the both/and, the supposed clash of imaginations begins to fade away. Collins rightly says that a truly visionary organization “embraces continuity and change, conservatism and progressiveness, stability and revolution, predictability and chaos, heritage and renewal, fundamentals and craziness. And, and, and.”
In moving forward and engaging the issues we face, we have no doubt this must be the case.
I (Alan) admit that in my own early days as a church planter, leadership developer, and missional strategist for my denomination, I was much more inclined to this oppositional kind of thinking. The breakthrough happened for me in researching for The Forgotten Ways, when I came to the astonishing realization that every church, incarnational and attractional and everything in between, already has the full potential of Apostolic Genius resident in it, and all that is needed is for us to reactivate it. This is a very powerful idea you should ponder for a while, because if it’s true—and I am convinced it is—then it changes everything.
We’ll spend time later on the process of reactivation, but we mention it here simply to suggest that every church, indeed every believer, has the full capacity for world transformation within, and when we can believe that, then we will begin to see the church very differently. But we have to be able to see it first. And, if we are willing, then we will find that the missional and the established forms are not mutually exclusive, because our core ecclesiology not only allows for but also champions both approaches.
But let us be clear: we believe church can be attractional and missional at the same time only if the organizational genetics, our core ideas, the paradigmatic brain at the center, legitimizes both impulses as important and justifiable expressions of what it means to contextualize the gospel in the Western world. It is this victory on the level of imagination—of our vision of the church as Jesus designed it to be—that makes a Verge church a real live possibility.
This isn’t necessarily easy, however, because we are steeped in oppositional-type thinking and because the movement approach on which so much depends has been largely marginalized, is misunderstood, and is underdeveloped. Verge churches will be those that have somehow found the necessary intellectual freedom and imaginative space to be able to overcome the captivity to their own prevailing ideologies—and, in light of that, are willing to reframe their core paradigm from being a church to being a movement. One of the main ways to do this is to get over the impasse of either/or and imagine a church that embraces the both/and.
Mix and Match
Essentially, the new paradigm of apostolic movements is the “con-Vergence” of three distinct ways of thinking about church:
• Church-growth theory, which extends and maximizes traditional ecclesiology and organizes the church around the evangelistic function.
• Exponential thinking, as an application of the emerging science of idea-viruses and tipping points to ecclesiology. It has also stimulated church-planting efforts over the last decade or two.
• Incarnational missiology, which requires reorienting the entire church around the primarily outward-oriented function of mission and recontextualizing the church into different subcultures.
We suggest a new paradigm (see fig. 3), and it will, we believe, define the thinking and practice of the church for the next few decades and present the church with its first real opportunity to reverse the long-term decline in every Western context. So when exponential/viral/networked thinking informs church-growth savvy, which in turn is being reframed around missional-incarnational theology, then history is in the making.
The reason why we feel so bullish about what is happening is because it brings together our very best thinking about mission with current best practices in church leadership and organization. The integration of the contemporary megachurch thinking with the more missional grassroots approach will result in better-resourced, better-led, savvy expressions of church, reframed by the deepest currents in the biblical story (missional-incarnational) and restructured around the world-changing organizational paradigm of exponential people-movements. What’s not to celebrate?
Renovating Old Truths: Remembering the Forgotten Ways
This concept of renovating ancient truths is critical if what we are suggesting is to be understood as more than another church-growth fad. In The Forgotten Ways, I (Alan) suggest we can infer from the dynamics of exponential people-movements that all of God’s people already have everything in them to be able to get the job done. I call this “dormant (or latent) potentials,” and it fully explains why, for instance, the pre-communist Chinese church, a highly institutional form of church, can end up looking and acting just like the early church when all the institutional forms are removed because of external threat and persecution.
The only conclusion I could reach was that the full possibility of movement was already there in the system. All that was needed was something to activate it. Apostolic Genius, the name of the phenomenon which encodes apostolic movement in what I call mDNA, is latent in the church but is largely dormant because it’s buried under the more institutional forms and blinded by the predominant mindset.
In the practice of contemplative prayer, we relax our well-practiced defenses and inner chatter to become alert to the God-who-is-already-there. We realize afresh that he has been there all along; it was we who were not aware. So too the solution to our situation is already embedded in the theological genetic codes of church.
The answer for the church lies in the deepest framework of our ecclesiology as Jesus designed it. We are not simply saying this as a little peppy inspirational thing; we are stating a deep truth that will help us avoid importing false and misleading ideas and methodologies into the church in order to motivate it. This is not magic but simply recognizes that God has invested his people with real potentials, due largely to the ever-present kingdom of God, the lordship of Jesus, the transforming power of the gospel, and the presence of the Holy Spirit in and among the people of God. We are the church of Jesus.
Furthermore, we can say, from the study of mass movements in general, that many of the same dynamics exist in all human movements. For instance, organic systems don’t just serve Christian missional movements and disciple-making. Apprenticing people into a system or ideology is something all organizations can do. It’s not magic; it’s what living systems theorists call “distributed intelligence” and recognizes that in God’s world there is inherent order and design and that systems tend to be self-organizing.
It’s not as strange as it sounds at first. For instance, we can acknowledge that in every seed is the potential for a tree, and in every tree is the potential for a forest. But the potential is all contained in the initial seed. Thinking this way, we can say that in every seed there is a forest. Likewise, in every spark there is the full potential of the flame, and in every flame the potential of a massive inferno. But it’s all there, in potential at least, in the tiny spark.
Apostolic Genius is a term that encompasses the six elements of mDNA, which we’ll discuss later in the book. These six elements are:
1. Jesus is Lord
2. Disciple-making
3. Apostolic environment
4. Missional-incarnational impulse
5. Organic systems
6. Communitas
This mDNA changes everything, because it’s not that we have to import some alien set of ideas into the church but rather that we must reactivate what is already there in potential. When we suggest we have to (re)activate Apostolic Genius at the very core of the church/organization, it means we’re simply triggering what’s already present. The approach taken in this book will therefore be to remember what we’ve tended to forget, and to forget some things we’ve tended to remember.
A Chaordic Approach to Change
The apostolic movement way of thinking should be embedded in the very heart of each church/organization; this in turn will inform innovative ethos and practices throughout the rest of the church/organization.
Dee Hock is right when he says, “Purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. To the degree you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with command and control. People will know how to behave in accordance with them, and they’ll do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization will become a vital, living set of beliefs.”
He says elsewhere, “All organizations are merely conceptual embodiments of a very old, very basic idea—the idea of community. They can be no more or less than the sum of the beliefs of the people drawn to them; of their character, judgments, acts, and efforts. An organization’s success has enormously more to do with clarity of a shared purpose, common principles and strength of belief in them than to assets, expertise, operating ability, or management competence, important as they may be.”
Hock calls this the “chaordic” principle: enough order at the center to give common identity and purpose, enough chaos to give permission to creativity and innovation. When you think of it, this is exactly how the original Jesus movement was organized, and we suggest that this is how we should strive to reframe our understanding of ecclesia as we move toward Verge church thinking.
A Model for Apostolic Movement
Before you come to the end of this book, we want to clearly answer the very practical question, “How do I begin apostolic movement in my church?” This is what we will call “movementum.”
Here is the process this book will take to get you to movementum:
Part 1: “Imagine.” We will begin with the importance of missional imagination in helping us to rethink what we mean by ecclesia, and move on to imagining new possibilities. Imagination allows us to see the mission as Jesus sees it. The goal in this step is for each individual and the community to “see it.”
Part 2: “Shift.” This second section forms the paradigm-shifting heart of the book. Here we describe how churches can activate apostolic movement vision and philosophy at the heart of the church. We must reframe our basic concepts of church to understand the mission as Jesus understands it. The goal in this step is for each individual and the community to “get it.”
Part 3: “Innovate.” We then look into the dynamics of genuine innovation (as opposed to simple creativity), without which we are doomed to simply repeat what we already know. The church ought to do mission as Jesus does it. The goal in this step is for each individual and the community to “do it.”
Part 4: “Move.” In the final section, we explore what it takes to practically generate and maintain actual movement, or this movementum, throughout the church and become a Verge church. Movementum can be defined as the process of gaining missional momentum until we birth an apostolic movement, and movementum occurs when we are continuously taking our church through the preceding three stages: imagine, shift, and innovate.
The moves for an individual believer are the same as those of an entire community, as shown in figure 4.
This isn’t a change process you complete only once. This involves an ongoing cycle of renewal: to see (imagine) what Jesus wants you to see; to fully get (shift) and understand what he wants you to understand; and to obey (innovate) and do what he wants you to do. This is a constant process every church and every believer will go through over and over again with a relentless desire to see an apostolic movement and the mission of Jesus accomplished.
Michael Fullan, the Canadian guru on leadership and change, has observed that the two greatest failures of leaders are “indecisiveness in times of urgent need for action and dead certainty that they are right in times of complexity.” As we go about the task of moving to the Verge, we have to be willing to let go of prior certainties and go on a search for new, more sustainable ways of being God’s people in our day. We need to feel a relentless urgency, for the time is upon us. Decisions we make now will determine the course of events. We do live on the verge of the future.
Now is that time; lean into it.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Open
Would you describe yourself as driven by competition or by uncharted waters? One way to gauge this is to look at the kind of activities in which you are involved.
Explore
1. What was your gut response to this chapter? Overwhelmed, excited to continue, unsure, affirmed, convicted?
2. Looking at your current context, would you say you are attempting to reach the 40 percent or the 60 percent? How are you being relevant in the lives of those who would never set foot in a church?
3. How do the following verses support the North American church continually embarking into blue oceans? Traditionally, what arm of the local church uses these verses most?
You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. —Acts 1:8
Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” —Matthew 28:18
4. Take an honest look at the future of your church. Would you say your church is positioning itself to chart a course into a blue ocean or fighting to stay relevant in a red ocean? Where do you find yourself personally more drawn: red oceans or blue?
5. Within your congregation, who has the most relational potential with the 60 percent of your community who will not attend your church? How have you helped empower those men and women with the gospel?
6. We aren’t suggesting that traditional or even attractional expressions of church close up shop, so how would you imagine a both missional and attractional expression be lived out in your congregation?
Move
Spend some time with your church leadership team evaluating figure 4 on page 47.
• Where does our church currently fall on this diagram?
• What are the roadblocks between where we are and being a Verge church?
• What are some steps we can take toward Verge church thinking?
Alan Hirsch is the founding director of Forge Mission Training Network and the co-founder of ShapeVine.com, an international forum for engaging with world-transforming ideas. He is the author of several best-selling books on missional living, including The Shaping of Things to Come, The Forgotten Ways and Untamed: Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship, a 2011 Outreach Resource of the Year co-authored by his wife, Debra.
Dave Ferguson (right) is the lead pastor of Community Christian Church, an innovative multisite missional church with 11 locations in the Chicago metropolitan area. He is the movement leader for NewThing, an international network of reproducing churches and is the co-author, with his brother, Jon Ferguson, of Exponential: How You and Your Friends Can Start a Missional Church Movement, a 2011 Outreach Resource of the Year.
